love put a gun in my hand

Noel was having a baby. He waited at the end of Liam’s street for a cab and tried to think about the studio, the filthy state his trainers, anything, but at the bottom of every thought was this single, basic fact. Not the fact of being pregnant at all; no, by the time the doctor’d sat him down with that somber look, Noel’d already sort of guessed. And pregnancy itself was a temporary condition—very temporary, depending on the measures one took.

But Noel wasn’t going to take them, because the truth of it was this: it was Liam’s baby, and Noel was having it.

He got home, somehow. He found himself at his own front door. He let himself in, his skin clammy with the damp rains of October. The nausea he’d been enduring for weeks sat heavy and sick in his stomach. He found Sara in the kitchen. She was at the beginnings of a soup, he thought. Something hearty; he could see the celery and potatoes out. “Everything all right at the doctor’s?” she asked.

She had her hair tied back, showing off her ears. Noel’d always liked them. He’d shagged a lot of women, been serious about a few, but Sara’s were the only ears he’d ever felt anything in particular for. It was something about the delicate shell curved around the bold, decisive whorls. He’d got a half-written lyric about them somewhere that Sara had told him point-blank he wasn’t allowed to ever sing in public.

Noel swallowed down the nauseous unease and said, a little bit choked, “Well, I ain’t dying.”

Sara went still. After a moment she set down the vegetable knife on the countertop; slowly she turned to look at him. “Aren’t you, then.”

For the second time that day, Noel dug around in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the ultrasound photos. It was easier than saying it, somehow. Sara took the envelope like it might bite her. She gave the photos a long look, understanding already clear in every line of her body. “It’s his,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Are you—” She looked a little closer at him, and her mouth twisted. “You’re keeping it.”

It’d taken Noel hours to realize it; it’d taken Liam telling him what he’d refused to know, persuading him with every trick Liam knew. All Sara’d had to do was look at him. “Yeah.”

“So you’re—oh. You’ve already been to see him.”

“Yeah.”

Sara looked him in the eye, long and steady. “So that’s it, then.”

“Sara—”

“I really thought I’d done it. I thought I’d got you away from him at last. More fool me.”

“You had,” Noel said, uselessly, for there were no assurances he could make now that would mean anything. The one thing Sara wanted, he couldn’t give her. “If this hadn’t happened—”

“No. If you two never spoke again, I’d still be sharing you with him, wouldn’t I? I was kidding myself. And I can’t do it anymore, Noel. Even when it was just on the road it was too much, but here at home? And a baby?”

“I know,” Noel said. He did. He had. He’d sat there in Liam’s kitchen while Liam crooned sweet nothings to his belly, and Noel had known what it would cost. He’d barely even hesitated.

“Do you really?” Sara asked. “Do you have any fucking idea what you’re doing?” She wasn’t crying. She never cried during an argument, and Noel always liked that about her, that she didn’t dissolve into tears in the moment like some women did.

Now it made things worse somehow. “Whatever it is, it’s not your problem anymore.”

Sara laughed, sharp and bitter. “Yeah. I guess you’re right about that. Well. I suppose I’ll see about a new place to live, won’t I? Me and Donovan.”

“Sara—” he began. “You can’t—you know you can’t say anything about—” He realized his hand had fallen to his stomach. Christ. He curled it into a fist and dropped it to his side. “You know I’ll give you—”

“Noel Gallagher,” she said, eyes shining with a fury as bright as he’d ever seen. “I want you to think about the years we’ve been together, and then I want you to think very carefully about what you say next.”

As if she wouldn’t accept the money readily enough when it came down to it. Everybody did, sooner or later. He’d call it child maintenance, and she’d agree, smooth as pie. But that was an eventuality, and he couldn’t afford to wait that long. Neither could the baby, although the very thought of it still felt alien, impossible.

Sara was still watching him with that bright fury, eyebrows raised. “You won’t tell anyone about me and Liam,” he said easily, full of certainty he didn’t feel. He’d learned a long time ago how to shape the world with words and front, but he’d rarely needed to with Sara. Not like this. “You won’t make the kid pay for things I’ve done. It ain’t to blame for any of this.”

She held his gaze a moment more, unblinking, and then she shook her head. That meant Noel had won, as he’d thought he would. What woman wanted to tell the world her longtime partner, the father of her child, had thrown her over for his brother?

Then she said softly, “I’d have done this with you, you know.” She gestured toward his stomach. “If you’d wanted to. There are procedures—it could still have been all ours. Might have been a nice change after Donovan—let you get the swollen feet and the heartburn, the second time around.” Her mouth twisted, and it wasn’t tears, but it was painful to look at anyway. “But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? You’d never have wanted to do it with me. Or with anyone else, I suppose. Just him.”

There was no answer to that. She waited a moment for one anyway, and then she shook her head again, eyes bright, and left him there.

Noel looked around at the kitchen at the abandoned soup preparations. He wanted a drink. Too fucking bad he wasn’t having one. Fuck, another six months without a drink. That was too bleak a future to think about.

The world was different than it’d been that morning. His house was different, and he found himself wandering blankly through it. Distantly he recognized that he was in some kind of shock, but the thought washed away before he could give it much mind.

It wasn’t until he was stood in the doorway of his second study that he realized what he’d been looking for. The room had good light from the windows, and it wasn’t far from the master bedroom, buried at the back of the house as it was. They’d considered it for Donovan before choosing the room next door. This one was jammed full of useless shit accumulated over the years—‘study’ was a generous term for it—but all of that could be cleared out, a crib put over against one wall, a chest of drawers in the corner by a diaper hamper. It’d want painting, probably. Sara’d know—

Well. An interior designer would know all about that, he reckoned.

He didn’t know how long he’d been stood there when Sara cleared her throat behind him. He turned to see her down the hall with Donovan on her hip, a dark, lopsided silhouette. “We’re going to my parents’,” Sara said. “We’ll be a few days.”

“Right,” Noel said, as if there were anything else for him to say. Once Sara moved out properly, they’d have to work out how to share Donovan. Noel had shared Anais with Meg all this time. He could do it again.

“Right,” Sara echoed. She shook her head and took Donovan away. After a while, Noel heard the front door close.

He made his way back to the kitchen. Everything was still there: carrot rounds, half-chopped celery stalks, the butcher’s knife discarded on the cutting board. He’d worry about nutrients and whatever the fuck tomorrow, he decided; tonight he was getting fucking takeaway.

He moved to sweep the vegetables into the bin. Somehow in the act he nicked himself with the knife. Blood welled up from the meat of his thumb. “Fuck,” Noel said. “Fucking hell.” He went to put a plaster on it. Afterwards he stood there in the bathroom, feeling weirdly light-headed as he watched the blood staining a dark spot under the bandage. Around him, the house was very still.

He was having a baby, and it was Liam’s.

After a while, he went and got his coat. He put on his shades and his trainers again and fetched his mobile, and he went out in the darkening afternoon. He was in a cab halfway to Liam’s place before he thought to text him. You still at home?

Yeah came the reply, just as the cab pulled onto Liam’s street. Then, just like that morning, Why.

It was raining again. Noel hadn’t ever really got dry the first time, and now the damp was under all his clothes. It chilled him and made him itch, all at once. He was wiping rain from behind his shades when Liam opened the door to him for the second time that day.

“Noel?” Liam said doubtfully. “Thought you said you’d be in touch.” He stepped aside anyway to let Noel pass, easier than he had this morning. Just like that, Noel was in again: in Liam’s life, in his grumbling good graces. The only thing that had ever had a hope of keeping them apart was Noel himself, and he’d fucked that right up, hadn’t he? All his resolve and good intentions had melted away with his first glimpse of that ultrasound.

Noel waited just long enough for Liam to close the door, and then he gripped the back of Liam’s neck and said, “Wouldn’t you call this being in touch?” Then he leaned up and took Liam’s mouth with his.

How’d Noel ever thought he’d live without this? He needed it. He tasted the yeasty flavor of Liam’s beer and felt the hot slide of his tongue, and he pressed right up against him, tugging them together until they were flush from heart to hip.

“What’s got into you?” Liam mumbled.

He was so slow, Noel’s brother. He always needed things explained to him. “You know what’s got into me,” Noel said. He tugged Liam’s hand towards his middle, sliding it awkwardly between their bodies until Liam’s palm was flat against Noel, below his navel. “You fucking put it there.”

Liam exhaled sharply, and then, finally, he got with the program. He could be a single-minded kisser at times, like he meant to eat Noel from the lips down. Noel needed that tonight. He needed Liam’s harsh breath against his mouth between kisses and Liam’s grip on his hips, tight enough to leave bruises.

(Only accidental ones. Liam loved a love bite or painting Noel white with ribbons of his own spunk, anything that’d mark Noel as his, but he’d apologize for those finger-shaped bruises come morning. For all Liam lived and moved like an unsprung trap—or maybe because of it—he was twitchy about violence done in bed.)

Liam began fiddling with the fly of Noel’s jeans. He made an inquiring noise into Noel’s mouth.

“Not here,” Noel said, pulling away. “Fucking hell, not here. I’ve already had it off in your front hall once today.”

Liam considered him, his eyes huge and dark in the dim afternoon. “Come on, then,” he said. He turned around and headed up the stairs. After a breath of hesitation, Noel followed.

Noel’d been to Liam’s house once before, soon after he’d bought it. They’d got drunk on the back patio and had a proper row to christen the place and entertain all the neighbors. Noel’d promised himself then that he’d never come back. He hadn’t even thought of that when he’d come over earlier. Now he could almost hear the echoes of those raised voices, the words indistinct. He had no idea what they’d fought about.

Liam had given him a tour, he thought. Noel’d been down this hallway once before. He’d never turned in at the end of it, though, into the master bedroom with its square footage mostly taken up by the king bed, its linens and walls all a clean, soft white. The whole house was bright, open, sparkling with good cheer. Not much like you, is it? He thought he’d said that to Liam, years ago. Liam had only shrugged.

Liam wasn’t shrugging now. He hovering just inside the threshold, watching warily, as if even now Noel might turn and run. Deliberately, with Liam’s eyes still resting on him, Noel stepped across that invisible boundary. If Noel stood under that gaze too long he’d start doubting, too; he’d remember what he’d left behind, what he’d imagined his future would look like.

He didn’t give himself the chance. He fisted his hands in the sides of Liam’s t-shirt and tugged him in for another kiss. Once he was touching Liam, there was never any room for thinking—except for now, it seemed, when he couldn’t stop. You want him: an old, guilty refrain with all the edges long since worn smooth. Noel wasn’t made for guilt.

You’re going to shag him: almost as old but still with a bit of zing in it, still a chance of stirring his cock, because he and Liam were sick fucks, the both of them.

He’s the father of your child.

“Fuck,” Noel said, pulling away to stare at Liam. Liam stared back, startled but not alarmed, already halfway to trusting Noel again, which made him some kind of idiot except here Noel was, stood in his bedroom, having his kid. “Fuck.”

“Noel?”

Noel yanked at the button of Liam’s jeans, then the zipper. He shoved the jeans down Liam’s hips. “Come on,” he said. “Get your clobber off. On the bed.”

Liam went quietly for once. He kicked his jeans off and stripped off his shirt while Noel did the same. “I’m not shagging you with your socks on,” Noel said. Liam rolled his eyes and pulled those off, too. He lay back on the comforter in his boxer shorts, propped up on his elbows to see what Noel would do next.

He was beautiful. His hair had grown out from that buzz cut at the beginning of the year, and now it was shaggy and uneven like scissors had never touched it, which probably meant he’d paid a couple hundred quid to get it that way. A wisp of it had fallen in front of his eyes. His chest and limbs were a little hairier than when Noel first touched him long ago, but not much. He’d picked up some scars along the way, courtesy of pub fights or hookups in ill-considered locales.

His gaze still burned with that inner fire that razed a crowd with a glance and heated Noel’s skin wherever it fell. It set his blood boiling. “Fuck off,” Noel said. He wrote lyrics that sold millions, but fuck if he could have put together a single coherent sentence just then. That’s what Liam reduced him to. Noel crawled up on the bed and on top of Liam, who looked up curiously into Noel’s eyes, trusting him still. “Fucking—fucking shut up, all right,” Noel said, and he took Liam’s mouth again.

It was a gratifying moan Liam made. It hummed all through Noel and down to his cock. He gave Liam a hard, bruising kiss and ground down against Liam’s thigh. It wasn’t really enough, but Noel couldn’t think of what would be. He didn’t know what he wanted. Restless, furious energy buzzed through him. He bit Liam’s lip just for the sake of drawing another moan out of him. Liam cupped his big hands around Noel’s waist, and Noel ground down again, angling against Liam’s hip bone.

Liam mumbled something.

“What?” Noel said, too caught up in his own frustrated need to hear the words.

“I said you don’t have to be in such a rush. Nobody’s walking in on us, right?” He looked a little spooked as he stared up at Noel. He firmed his grip on Noel’s hips like he thought Noel might shove up and walk right out any minute. When that didn’t happen, he stroked soothingly along Noel’s side and said, “Ain’t had you proper in months, you know.”

Noel hadn’t meant Liam to ever have him again.

“Fucking hell,” Noel said.

Liam froze. Noel sank down on top of him, mashing his face against Liam’s shoulder.

After a couple of breaths, Liam relaxed and started with the stroking again, down Noel’s back this time. His breath rose and fell, lifting Noel with it. Proof of life, it was: Liam still drawing breath even when it felt like Noel couldn’t, Liam’s hand brushing along Noel’s spine when all Noel could do was lie there, putting every last bit of energy into holding onto him.

Noel hadn’t meant to ever have Liam again, either. But now he did have him, and he couldn’t give him up another time. Sara’d been right about that.

“Noel?” Liam said after a while. “You all right?”

It wasn’t a question that passed between them often. Noel found he couldn’t bear it now, Liam having the fucking gall to be concerned about him. He shoved up on his hands and crawled carefully down the length of Liam and between his legs, until he arrived at Liam’s cock, a sad, unenthused lump inside his boxer shorts.

The boxers were pale blue cotton, threaded through with yellow. Comfortable-looking. Noel thought he remembered them from a hookup on the tour—Mexico City, maybe, or that night in Brussels. There hadn’t been many such nights, this last tour. He thumbed over the bulge just to hear the sharp, startled hiss of Liam’s breath, and then again, light and teasing, until Liam twitched under his touch. Noel bent and got as much of Liam into his mouth as he could, cotton and all.

“Noel,” Liam said, shoving up on his elbows.

Noel ignored him. He wet the fabric with spit, and then he sucked the moisture out again. Liam took another of those sharp breaths. He twitched against Noel’s mouth.

It was slow work, making his way up to the tip of Liam’s cock, standing a lot readier in his boxers than when Noel had started. Noel got cotton fibers in his mouth. He breathed in Liam’s clean-washed scent—he’d showered after Noel left, and Noel let that thought pass through his mind and out again. This was what Noel had wanted: to not think of anything except Liam stiffening against his lips, Liam’s legs trembling as he fought to hold still, his breath speeding up.

“Noel,” Liam said again, sounding a little strangled.

Noel judged him close enough. He slid his fingers inside Liam’s waistband and ever so slowly dragged the boxers down, ever so carefully bringing Liam’s cock out. It wobbled in the air, the tip glistening faintly with precome and Noel’s own spit.

There was no cock in the world Noel knew as well as this one. Not even his own, he reckoned. He’d planned to never see it again. But that was thinking, and Noel’d given up thinking. He took a deep breath and closed his mouth over the tender pink head.

He got Liam moaning then. Noisy bastard, Liam. Noel sucked him and licked over his slit. He took Liam as deep as he could, until he gagged a little, and then he pulled off again. He listened for that particular change in pitch that meant Liam was coming to an end. Noel knew it like he knew the sound of his own breath. He felt like he’d always known it.

“Fuck,” Liam said. His hands fisted in the sheets, and he shot in Noel’s mouth.

Noel coughed once, but then he got himself right, and he took it. He swallowed it all. What was one more load? The one that really mattered, Liam had put in him months ago.

Noel rolled over onto his back. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. He was breathing almost as hard as Liam. His pulse raced. He swallowed a few more times, trying to get the flavor of Liam out of his mouth, but it was a lost cause. Story of his fucking life.

“Hey,” Liam said after a while. “Come up here, I’ll do you, yeah?”

Noel shook his head, eyes on the ceiling. Then he was sorry, because the motion made him a little queasy. A lot of things did these days.

“Well, come up here anyway, then.”

Noel’s bare feet were hanging off the edge of the bed. They were starting to get cold. He struggled back into his stomach and crawled up to where Liam was, and he let Liam bully him under the covers while shooting him worried, sidelong glances.

Liam always ran so hot. He was Noel’s own personal furnace, there under the blankets with him. “Here,” Liam said, “I’ve got some lube, right?” He stretched towards the side table and came back with a tube. “You gonna let me bring you off, then?”

“Whatever,” Noel said.

Liam gave him another of those irritating glances. The he greased his palm and reached down into the darkness between them, into Noel’s briefs.

Noel hadn’t been hard. Liam was so near to him, though, filling Noel’s nose with the scent of his soap, warming their cocoon with his body heat. His breath tickled Noel’s forehead and eyelids, and his grunt of concentration as he slid his hand down Noel’s cock was just as hot as the sound when he’d come. More, maybe. When Liam put his mind to something, no force on Earth could pull him away from it, and he was putting his mind to Noel now.

Noel closed his eyes and stopped fighting it. He accepted the frissons of pleasure as Liam’s hand glided along him. He rutted into Liam’s grip. Liam chuckled approvingly, and Noel didn’t even mind. It was all right. Everything was completely fucked, but it was all right. If Liam was so bent on making Noel feel good, then he’d let him.

It wasn’t a mind-blowing orgasm. Noel was mostly too old for those. It was a pleasant orgasm, a comfortable one. Afterward, Liam shifted the covers around a lot in the process of cleaning up, letting in chilly, unwelcome air, but at last he settled down again. Noel stretched out on his back, and Liam tucked into Noel’s side, one hand resting on him—on his belly, but Noel wasn’t thinking about that. Noel wasn’t thinking about anything at all.

Wakefulness came slowly and with difficulty. Noel’s head ached and his stomach was uneasy, and for an alarmed moment, he wasn’t sure where he was. Then he caught Liam’s scent on the bedsheets, and he remembered.

“Fucking hell,” Noel said. He struggled upright. Liam had gotten up long ago; the bed was cold where he’d been. Noel didn’t remember what time he’d arrived, but now the window was dark. He must have slept for hours. That was his life now, according to the doctor. Lots of rest. Small, frequent meals to keep the nausea at bay, except he couldn’t remember eating anything since breakfast. No wonder he felt a little sick.

He got up and went scavenging for his clothes. He pulled on his shirt and jeans and left his pants, which were dirty from the hand job. Let Liam clean that up, since he’d insisted on making the mess. Noel found a toilet and made use of it, and he took a few careful sips of water from the sink. Then he made his way downstairs.

Liam was sat in front of the TV, legs sprawled out and hands clutched around a takeaway box. He looked up when Noel hit a creaky step. Liam’s eyes were bright, searching. He saw a lot more than anyone gave him credit for—certainly more than Noel ever credited him in his hearing—and in that spotlight gaze, Noel felt a little naked.

Noel walked into the living room and nodded towards the box. “You got more of that?” Noel said. Liam jutted his chin towards the kitchen.

There was an unopened box sitting there on the counter. Noel cracked it open just wide enough to get a whiff and then hurriedly closed it again. Yeah, there’d be no curry for him tonight. He went browsing in the cupboards instead. Surely Liam kept something easy in here, something simple—aha. Good old Pot Noodle.

He ate it in the kitchen at the table tucked into the corner. TV sounds drifted in from the living room. Fuck, this really was a cottage Liam lived in. Quaint, Noel thought, but without the edge he meant to give it.

Noel ate slowly, waiting after each bite to see how it was going to settle. After a while, the queasy feeling began to fade, and he found he was starving. He finished the carton and went back for another. Halfway through the second he abruptly realized he didn’t want to eat another bite. He didn’t even want to smell it anymore. He got up and dumped it in the bin, and when he turned around, Liam was stood there in the doorway, watching him.

Noel hadn’t really looked at him before. He’d been too tangled up inside his own head all day to see more than a piece of Liam at a time, like the blind man with the elephant. Now he took him in; he tried, finally, to see what he was looking at.

Liam looked the same, was the thing. Cargo shorts and a dark long-sleeved shirt; eyes somehow too bright to properly fit in his face and full of more feeling than any one person ought to have. Whatever mark Noel had expected he’d leave on Liam when he walked out, whatever improvement his absence might have made, there was no sign of it. Liam looked fine.

“What?” Liam asked, his voice flat with impatience.

Noel shook his head, walked up to Liam, and kissed him. It was a soft, sweet kiss, not how he normally kissed Liam at all. He didn’t know why he did it. This was Noel’s brother, and he was having his kid. Maybe that was reason enough.

“I’m a fucking idiot,” Noel murmured, pulling away. Liam let him go. Noel wasn’t doing anything like he was supposed to, not kissing the way he usually did, not staying away like he’d sworn to himself and Sara that he would. For the moment, Noel felt serenely distant from that knowledge. He picked up his jacket, draped over a kitchen chair.

Liam’s eyes were still fixed on him. “You going out again? In the rain and that?”

Noel shrugged into the jacket and didn’t answer.

“You can stay here if you want.”

When was the last time Liam had invited him around to his house? It had to have been a couple of years. Probably because it’d been a few years before that since Noel’d last said yes. “And do what?” Noel said now. “Cuddle? You wanna rub my feet?”

Liam flushed at that, but he didn’t rise to the bait. They were neither of them quite in their right minds, Noel thought. “Right,” Noel said, and moved towards the door.

“You gonna call?” Liam asked.

Noel stilled, his hand on the doorknob. He was balanced on an edge, and for an instant there was no telling which way he’d fall, only that, inevitably, he would.

“Yeah, all right,” Noel said. He pulled open Liam’s front door, and he stepped out into the black, wet night.

Noel got a lot done over those next few days. He called up the specialist his GP had recommended and made an appointment. That was something for the PA to do, really, but he did it anyway. He cleaned out part of the study, though as he did it he wondered if he, one full-time child, and two part-time ones really needed a house this size. At least a third of the rooms were Sara’s.

The house was dead silent without her and Donovan around. Noel’d noticed it before when they went off for a few days to see the parents or on some holiday he had to miss, but usually he looked forward to it, a few nights of unbroken sleep, that time all to himself with no social engagements except those he made. Now there was something oppressive about it, so that it was a relief when the refrigerator came on.

On the third day, he got a text from Liam: Milan to promote PG back soon. Noel didn’t bother to reply. What could he have said? Enjoy making a fool of yourself shilling your ludicrous clothing line?

He went to an industry thing and didn’t drink. “I’m on a cleanse,” he told the few people who asked, and every single one of them nodded sympathetically, believing him, like the total fucking idiots they apparently were. Mostly, though, he talked music, which was so easy and familiar it felt surreal. For ten minutes at stretch he could forget there was anything strange happening to him at all.

“Where’s the missus?” someone asked now and again.

“She’s at her mam’s for a few days,” Noel explained each time.

He ended up in a corner with Dave Sardy, whom he hadn’t spoken to since soon after they finished Dig Out Your Soul. “Things looking pretty good for a solo album, then,” Sardy said, which was as polite and roundabout a way of asking about Oasis as Noel had gotten from anyone.

Or maybe the solo album really was all he was thinking about. “You’ll keep me updated, if you want to bring me in?” Sardy said.

Noel relaxed a little more. Maybe the whole fucking world wasn’t Noel Gallagher’s oyster, but this part of it was. “It’s a bit early for that, don’t you think?”

Sardy hummed thoughtfully, unbothered, and took another sip of beer.

At half past ten, Noel abruptly realized he’d like to be in bed. It took another half hour to extract himself and twenty minutes to get home. His stomach was giving him that uneasy feeling that said he’d better eat something, so he did that, too. He was sat at the kitchen table with his toast and beans when his mobile beeped with a text.

It was Liam, of course. He’d sent a selfie of himself with some guys Noel didn’t recognize, all hunched around a table littered with glasses. A moment later, Liam texted, you remember pub from hc tour.

Noel looked closer at the place. It did look a bit familiar with its candles on the tables and its wallpapered walls. Noel scraped his memory, but all that came to him were images: The band crammed around a table like that one. Liam’s arm slung around Noel’s shoulders, leaning too close even though he was talking to other people. Liam talking bollocks while his long hair kept tickling Noel’s skin. Noel getting whiffs of Liam’s obscenely expensive designer shampoo. The smell of lager in his glass; the taste of it in Liam’s mouth, back at the hotel.

Noel shook himself out of the sense memory. That could’ve been any of fifty cities on that tour or the previous one or the next. How did Liam remember? He’d been the one still on the marching powder at that point. Maybe he only thought he remembered; that seemed more likely.

What Noel texted back was, who’s the geezer?. No need to specify which. Liam would tell him about whichever one he thought was most interesting and assume that was obviously who Noel’d been talking about.

But Liam surprised him. home in four days how are you.

Noel scoffed. Neither of them was the “how are you” type of texter. Anyway, there was never a time that he didn’t have something better to do than answer Liam’s inane questions. Now he’d finished his toast, and he was remembering how badly he’d wanted to be in bed an hour and a half before.

Instead of putting the phone on silent and leaving things alone, he typed, wish I could have a drink.

why can’t you

Noel rolled his eyes. guess, he said, because why the fuck do you think, you fucking idiot was too much effort. He was already sorry he’d replied at all. He left his dishes on the table and took himself and his phone upstairs.

When he got out of the bathroom he had a new text. It said, fuck.

It’d been sent ten minutes ago; apparently there was no follow-up text coming. Noel shook his head and turned out the light.

Sara texted to say she’d be a few more days and that Noel was on his own for his weekend with Anais. He’d forgotten he even had a weekend with Anais coming up. Christ. He considered the prospect for a moment and then put it aside. That was days away; by then, he’d surely have figured out what he might want to say to her, if anything.

He shied away from calling his mother for the same reason. She’d ferret it out of him in two minutes.

He listened to the demos of a band Sardy had put him onto. They were all right, he supposed. He spent a blissful afternoon re-organizing the smaller closet full of trainers. It was all nonsense, barely a step up from literally twiddling his thumbs, but the tour was long over, and spring and all the songwriting urges it brought out in him was still far away. This was why he was rich, wasn’t it, so he could spend his days doing absolutely fuck-all if he liked.

On the third morning after his texts with Liam, he got a call from Gem. He answered it, curious. He’d only heard from Gem a couple of times since the break-up, and they hadn’t talked for long. Gem going along with Liam’s new band put a bit of a fucking damper on conversation. He didn’t seem to know quite how to talk about it yet, and Noel hadn’t exactly helped him along.

Noel found he didn’t mind the prospect quite so much now—neither the new band, nor talking about it. That was character growth, he assumed. “Yeah,” he said.

In his soft, easy drawl, Gem said, “Hey, so, I’ve been talking to Liam.”

Noel felt like he’d swallowed an ice cube. He could feel the chill of it, all the way down. “Oh?” he said, not quite choking on the word.

“Yeah, he said you guys made up?”

“Oh,” Noel said, less choked. All right, that wasn’t so bad. “Yeah, I guess you’d call it that.”

“So—that’s it then? We’re getting back together?”

Noel stared blankly out his kitchen window. “We who?”

There was a pause. “You know, chief. Oasis. We’re getting the band back together?”

“What? No. What? Did Liam tell you that?”

He missed what Gem said next, because of course Liam had told him that. Liam had interviews this week, hadn’t he, to promote Pretty Green? He’d probably told the whole fucking world already. “Gem, I’ll call you back. And we are not fucking getting back together.”

In the old days he’d have slammed the phone back into the cradle. Jabbing his finger at the End Call button wasn’t nearly as satisfying. He scrolled through his recent texts to the number from a few nights prior.

The call went to voice mail. “Liam, you absolute fucking cunt. I cannot fucking believe you. I can’t believe I—fuck. It’s all off, do you understand? All of it. I’m blocking this number, do you understand me? Fucking Christ.” He ended the call and tossed the phone across the kitchen island. It clattered over the side and onto the floor. Noel braced himself against the countertop and bowed his head. He was shaking, he realized.

He was disappointed. For almost a week, he’d let himself think—

It didn’t matter what he’d thought. It was sheer idiocy, it had been all along, and he was done with it. Really done, this time. Just like he’d been really done the last time, before all this started. He’d have to call that other number his GP had given him. He’d—talk to Sara? She’d take him back. He hadn’t done anything irreparable. He’d had one final moment of insanity for old time’s sake, that was all.

He couldn’t stand another fucking minute in his empty, silent house. He went to the music room, grabbed a guitar, and headed out. Some wise men had sung that money couldn’t buy love, but at least it bought studio time.

It was dark when Noel walked up to his house again. That was why he was almost to his front door before he realized there was someone in front of it, a shadowed figure slumped on the front step like they’d been there a while.

The studio time had helped, but not enough. No amount would have been enough for this. There was a part of Noel that knew if he had a roaring big row there on his doorstep, someone would inevitably catch wind of it. It was a wonder the paps weren’t already hovering—or maybe they’d got smart and hidden just out of view, waiting to catch the infamous Gallaghers in the act.

The rest of Noel didn’t give a flying fuck if the whole world heard. “Get the fuck away from my house.”

Predictably, Liam ignored this. “What do you mean it’s off?”

“What do you fucking think I mean? Now get the fuck away, or I’m calling the police.” He got out his phone. Maybe he’d even call them this time. He could. Sara would be so proud.

Liam pushed to his feet. He was a couple of steps above ground level, a bit taller than Noel to begin with, and still shrouded in the hood of his parka. He seemed a threatening figure, suddenly. “I haven’t got a fucking clue what you mean. Your weird little brain, nobody could guess the shit you come up with.” Well, that was rich. “So what’s this about?”

“Liam,” Noel said, fighting to keep his voice level. “Leave.”

“Like fuck.”

Noel wasn’t going to call the police. He wasn’t going to fight his way to his own front door, either. Unbidden, the memory came to mind of a guitar crashing against a dressing room floor, and for an instant, all Noel could hear was the sound it had made as it splintered. He turned and strode down the pavement, the way he’d come.

“Noel!” Footsteps thudded behind him. A hand gripped his upper arm and spun him around.

Noel twisted violently away. “Do not fucking touch me, or you’ll never see me again.” He was breathing hard, and his heart was racing.

“Then will you quit running away and tell me what you’re fucking on about?”

All Noel could see of Liam’s face was the shine of the streetlight off his great beak of a nose. The rest was buried in shadow. Liam was breathing hard, too. His hands were balled up like they got sometimes in a fight—not to throw a punch, even, not always. It was like his body could barely hold all the tension, and it had nowhere else to go but his fists.

“Christ,” Noel said.

They looked at each other a moment more—or in the direction of each other’s shadowed faces, anyway—and then Noel detoured around Liam and walked back up to his house. Inevitably, Liam followed.

Noel stood by to let Liam in, and he closed the door behind him. He didn’t look him in the eye. He set his guitar down, out of the way of whatever might happen next. He turned his back on Liam and went deeper into the house without really knowing where he was going, and when he found he’d arrived in the kitchen, he didn’t know why he’d come there. He went to the sink to wash his hands. It was something to do.

From behind him, Liam said, “If you wanted to get rid of it, you coulda just done it. You didn’t need to be fucking dramatic about it.”

His hands still dripping, Noel turned to tell Liam who was being dramatic, but he didn’t get the words out. He looked at Liam and went still. Liam had finally thrown back the hood of his parka. His eyes were red. Not wet, though. He’d been crying before Noel arrived, sat there on Noel’s front step.

Liam swallowed. “You didn’t have to string me along, either.”

“Me,” Noel scoffed, his words finally coming unstuck. “I’m not the one who told Gem we were getting the band back together.”

“What?”

“What,” Noel parroted. “Are you saying you didn’t tell Gem? Because I have a phone call that says otherwise.”

“No. I mean, I did. So?” And there he stood, Noel’s infuriating brother, not a trace of guilt on his face nor even any of his usual bullshit. Liam, god help him, just looked confused.

Liam wasn’t having him on. Did that make it better or worse? “So we’re not,” Noel said.

“We’re not what?”

“Fucking Christ, Liam, we’re not getting Oasis back together.”

“Yeah, I listened to your bloody voicemail. Why do you think I’m here?”

“No,” Noel said. “We weren’t ever getting back together. That was never on the table. I never fucking said anything like that, and you just go announcing it. I suppose you told those people, too, right? Your promotional interviews? Fuck.”

“What do you mean we weren’t? Why not?”

“Well I don’t fucking know, maybe because I’m tired of my guitars getting destroyed.”

Liam scoffed. He scoffed. “Like you ain’t got the money to buy loads more.”

Noel turned back to the sink, so he didn’t smash something on the floor. He hung his head and breathed. He felt Liam’s approach, but Liam didn’t touch him, which showed he had some degree of self-preservation instinct despite all appearances to the contrary.

Noel couldn’t stand there hanging over the sink forever. Eventually he turned around to find Liam warily loitering a few feet out of reach. “Liam,” Noel said, enunciating carefully, less for Liam’s sake than for the sake of his own temper, “I’m not fucking going back to Oasis. I’m done with Oasis. If Oasis is all you want, then say the word, and I’ll flush this—” He gestured sharply to his stomach. “—down the toilet and we’ll just go back to not speaking.”

“You don’t mean that,” Liam said, edging towards him.

“Take one step more and you’ll find out if I fucking mean it.”

“But—” Liam’s brow knit, always the sign of great and ponderous thought occurring. “But we’re talking again, right? That’s how it always goes. You throw your little tantrum, and then you get over it and we’re a band again, right? We’re brothers again.”

What out of that to respond to first? That was one of Liam’s magical powers, the ability to dazzle you with so many different types of bollocks at once that you just gave up. “We’re always brothers,” Noel said. “God help me.”

“Well, sometimes it don’t feel like it. Like today, I saw you called, and I thought it was something cool, like something about—you know.” He nodded towards Noel, because he was no more able than Noel to say some things out loud. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat, hunching into it. “And then it was you telling me it was all over. Again. I wasn’t meant to come back until tomorrow, you know.”

He mumbled that last bit, like a confession; like of all things, that was what he thought Noel might give him shit for.

“Liam, I can’t fucking do that with you again. All right? All the chaos and the property damage and the—the noise. You’re a right cunt to tour with, you do know that?”

Liam snorted. “Right, I am. We hardly seen you this last year. It was me and Gem and Andy, the crew, everybody having the craic while you sulked over in the corner sipping on some cunt’s drink with a little umbrella in it.”

“That’s—you know what, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to explain myself to you. I’m not going back to Oasis. I’ve wrote songs for you to sing for twenty years, but I’m not doing it anymore. So if that’s what it means to you, being brothers, than I guess we’re not anymore.”

It hurt a hell of a lot more to say than he’d have thought, considering until a week ago he thought he might never speak to Liam again. It was different saying it when no one was shouting. Or when Noel’d lost his grip on that icy, steely anger. It’d slipped away at some point during the conversation when he wasn’t paying attention, and now all he had left was exhaustion.

He bowed his head. Quietly, he said, “Or if you want to have a baby together, we could do that.”

Liam huffed softly. “That’s not very brotherly, is it?”

“Well, not generally, no.”

He felt Liam’s touch on his arm. He looked up. “You think you’ll like that better?” Liam asked. “Sharing a kid, instead of a band? Or you gonna decide you hate me and fuck off again, and—and take my kid with you?”

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Noel looked to the ceiling. Unsurprisingly, there were no answers up there. “Christ, I don’t know, Liam.”

“But you want it, still?”

Noel took a deep, shuddering breath. “Yeah. Fuck me, I do. God only knows why.” And that was the real sticking point, wasn’t it? Not whether it was wrong or whether Noel should; he knew perfectly well the answers to those questions, and they’d never stopped him before when he wanted something. When he wanted Liam.

The question was: for God’s sake, why?

“Yeah,” Noel said again, hoarse. “I want it.”

Liam nodded. Then, slowly enough that Noel didn’t realize at first what was happening, Liam folded to his knees and mashed his face against Noel’s stomach. After a moment, his shoulders began to shake.

“Liam, fuck.” Noel palmed the back of Liam’s head. He thumbed over the funny whorl of hair at the crown.

Liam heaved in a breath and wrapped his arms around Noel’s thighs—not a friendly grope, but like a child hanging on for dear life. After a while, he said in a soggy voice, “I thought maybe you’d got rid of it already.”

Noel thought it probably took more than a few hours to arrange an abortion, especially for a man. Anyway, even the idea of it made him feel a little sick. There was a reason, he thought, that he’d gone to the studio instead of picking up the phone and making the fucking call.

“Well, I didn’t,” he said. Liam nodded against him.

Noel stroked his hair some more. Eventually, when the hitching of Liam’s breath had smoothed out, Noel said, “Right, you letting me go anytime soon?”

Grudgingly Liam let go and sat back on his heels. He ducked his head, like Noel couldn’t possibly notice he’d been crying if he didn’t actually see the tears. Noel gave Liam’s hair one last awkward stroke, and then Liam pushed to his feet. He stood just there in Noel’s kitchen, as if he belonged in it.

The strangeness of it made Noel a little queasy—or maybe that was just the aftermath of his earlier fury. He swallowed hard. “I suppose you’ll need to be getting home,” he said. “Now that you’re back in town.”

“Yeah,” Liam said.

“Well, then.”

Liam made no move towards the door. He fixed Noel with one of those long looks. His lashes were wet, his eyes redder than before. Cautiously, like he thought Noel might bolt, he closed the distance between them. When he kissed Noel at last, his lips were rough. He’d been biting them, Noel thought, while he’d waited on Noel’s doorstep.

For a good two breaths, maybe three, Noel was still too angry to kiss him back. He held stock-still and let Liam pressed their mouths together. Then, inevitably, he gave in. He opened to Liam and took back the kisses Liam had taken from him, one by one, all the while thinking how he’d given this up just a few hours earlier. He’d decided. He’d been so fucking sure.

“I fucking hate you,” he murmured against Liam’s mouth.

“Yeah,” Liam said. “But you love me just as much, and then a little bit more.”

Noel pulled back, incredulous. “Is that right.”

Liam met his gaze evenly. “Yeah. Same as I love you.”

Noel scoffed. Sarcasm, disbelief: they were the only defenses he had when Liam got like this, when he fixed Noel with that look like he could see right into his soul. The fucking nerve. “I think it’s time you left.”

Liam ducked his head in agreement. “When am I gonna see you again?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Miraculously, Liam accepted that answer. He let Noel herd him towards the front door. His hand on the knob, he got that troublemaking look in his eye, and he reached out and palmed Noel’s stomach through his t-shirt. Before Noel could do more than sputter, Liam had retreated and was halfway out the door. “Later, then,” Liam said, and he walked out into the night.

For a long time after Noel closed the door, he felt that brief warmth against his skin.

When Anais came for the weekend, Noel didn’t end up telling her anything. She asked about Sara, and he said she’d made a run up to Edinburgh. “Just the two of us today, right? No stopping to change nappies.”

“You don’t change nappies,” Anais said, disconcertingly.

“I most certainly do. I changed enough of yours. Do you have any fucking idea how much shit you produced in the first year of your life?”

“Dad!” Anais said, wrinkling her nose, and that was the end of that conversation.

He did change Donovan sometimes, just like sometimes he was the one to get up in the night when crying came over the baby monitor, but maybe he didn’t always do a full fifty percent of the job, if Anais hadn’t ever noticed it. And soon he was going to be doing all of it for—for this new addition. Jesus fucking Christ.

“Dad?” Anais asked, and Noel realized he’d been staring off into space.

“So,” he said, collecting himself, “what are we up to today, then?”

Anais wanted to cook something, in keeping with her recent aspiration to be a world-class chef. “I want to be a chef like you’re a rock star,” she’d told him a few weeks ago, which was impossibly adorable coming from an earnest ten-year-old with Noel’s very own beetly eyebrows, God bless her. So they scrolled through a collection of recipes Anais had curated—Noel firmly put his foot down on squid and then, after a moment’s slightly nauseated consideration, on all seafood—and eventually settled on a pasta dish which Noel felt they were unlikely to either fuck up beyond edibility or destroy the kitchen with.

They went to the shops, and Noel scowled over Anais’s head at people who looked like they might ask for a photograph. He listened to Anais’s cheerful gossip from school and provided caustic commentary now and then, when it seemed like she wanted some. They got on, he and Anais.

Donovan was just now getting to the age when Noel could get on with him, too. He and Sara had talked about trying to get pregnant again in a year or two, so one more child to get to know shouldn’t have been as strange an idea as it felt to him just then, standing in the aisle at fucking Waitrose while Anais very seriously compared olive oils.

It seemed suddenly impossible that he could just stand there pregnant with his brother’s child without anyone noticing. He still fit in all his clothes; there was nothing different to see except maybe the circles under his eyes—despite how much he’d been sleeping—and yet he felt conspicuous.

“Haven’t you picked one yet?” he asked Anais. He pointed to a green bottle at random. “Look, that’s the one you want.”

They made the pasta for a late lunch. Noel’d had his doubts about the red pepper flakes, but the dish tasted all right, and the kitchen remained intact. Wanting to be a chef made Anais more agreeable about the washing-up afterward, too. She chattered about other recipes she wanted to try once Sara was back. “But you did really good today,” she added hastily, lest Noel feel his culinary skills had been slighted.

How the fuck was he going to tell her Sara was leaving? She’d been around for as long as Anais could remember.

Well, there was someone else he should tell. After the washing-up, he got Anais settled in front of the TV. He took his phone up to the window seat overlooking the garden, and finally, after putting it off for far too long, he called his mother.

“What’s the matter?” Peggy asked as soon she picked up the phone.

Noel’d known this was how the call would go. It still put him immediately on edge. “What makes you think something’s the matter?”

“You haven’t called me in almost a week, and that means there’s something you don’t want to tell me. Well, out with it.”

Noel took a deep breath. Alone, with no one’s eyes on him, he let himself palm his stomach where that stubborn bit of life had taken root, against all wisdom. “You’ve got another grandchild on the way,” he said.

“Oh, Noel.” Peggy’s smile was audible. She loved them, grandkids. Noel sometimes thought the first thing Liam had ever done to really, truly disappoint her was get a child on Lisa Moorish that Peggy so far had never gotten to meet. Her first grandchild, even. “That’s wonderful,” she said now. “When’s Sara due, then?”

Oh, god. “Well, that’s the thing. It’s not Sara who’s pregnant.”

“Oh, Noel.” The same words, now full of reproof.

“It’s me.”

There was a pause. Liam had prepared her for the possibility of her sons randomly knocking up strange women. He hadn’t prepared her for this. Hesitantly, she asked, “Do you mean like—like that therapy they’ve been talking about on the telly, like that Geordie boy got with his wife?”

“No, Mam. It’s not Sara’s kid.”

A longer pause this time. The silence was excruciating, and it was all Noel could do not to hang up. At last, Peggy asked, “Should I ask who the man is?”

“He’s not in the picture,” Noel said. Even as he said it, he realized this was going to be fucking weird. It was one thing to politely omit shagging your brother for fifteen years and another to lie outright about who’d fathered your child.

“And you—you’re keeping it, then?”

It’d been years and years since Noel had given Peggy reason to remember that her son wasn’t entirely straight. Would her remaining Irish Catholic scruples have allowed her to even entertain the idea of an abortion if he’d been a daughter instead, if he’d gotten up the duff from church-approved heterosexual activity?

It wasn’t worth thinking about. “Yeah, I’m keeping it. If I can, anyway. I’m old to be doing this, you know.”

“If it’s meant to be, then it’ll all come out right,” Peggy said firmly.

Noel felt tears prick his eyes. That was the hormones, no doubt. He wasn’t actually crying over a meaningless platitude, even if it did come from his mam. Even if it sounded like support.

Peggy wanted to know if he’d been to the doctor yet and then what the doctor had said; he hedged a lot there. There was only so much detail he was willing to give his mam about his reproductive organs, particularly ones he’d only recently discovered he had. Besides, he didn’t know very much. He hadn’t even seen the specialist yet.

She wanted to know how Sara was taking it all; she didn’t sound surprised by his answer, but she kept her thoughts to herself. Then she wanted to know about Donovan and Anais and finally, of course, Liam. “Have you spoke to him yet?”

“Mam, you’ve got to stop that,” Noel said. He already felt raw; he definitely wasn’t up for rehashing the tentative reconciliation with Liam. (Did it count as tentative if Noel was having his kid?) “You’ve got to let us manage ourselves. We’re your grown adult sons.”

“Supposedly,” Peggy said. Her tone said she was reserving judgment.

Later, at the end of the call, Peggy told him, “You take care. Take care of yourself and—and my new grandchild.”

“I will,” Noel said. His eyes were hot again. He ended the call and wondered if he was going to feel like this the whole pregnancy, weepy and over sensitized. He fucking hoped not. At least he hadn’t started bawling in front of Liam yet.

Noel was sat on the sofa with his guitar when Sara and Donovan came home. He went to go help, and Sarah handed him Donovan, half-asleep. “And how are you, young man?” Noel asked. Donovan, noticing his new location, began to fuss tiredly, making sounds like words except they weren’t. It was a long trip home from Edinburgh for a toddler, no matter how much money the toddler’s parents had to ease the way.

Noel looked up and found Sara watching him. Her face was drawn, and not just with the day of travel. She looked at him closely and said, “You haven’t changed your mind, then.”

It was then, seeing the lines of strain he’d put on her face, that Noel felt the first stirrings of real grief. It seemed as though the choice he’d made hadn’t been real to him until that moment, but maybe that wasn’t even true; maybe the next period of his life was going to just be a long series of realizations that were, in the end, all the same realization that he had over and over again. “Fuck, Sara.”

“Right. I didn’t think you had, only—” She shrugged. “Never mind.”

“Sara,” he repeated. She pressed her lips together in a flat, thin line, which was her trick to keep from crying. Noel shifted Donovan over onto his hip and reached for her, and she let him draw her in for a kiss. She tasted of lip gloss and the coffee she must have drunk on the train. They were familiar flavors; Noel’d had eight years to get to know them.

After a moment Sara shook her head and pulled away. “I’ve got to put this one down for a nap,” she said, taking Donovan out of his arms. Her voice was tight, and if she hadn’t ducked away so quickly, Noel probably would have seen tears. In that, at least, she and Liam weren’t so different.

As a very small, very poor apology, Noel took her bag to the bedroom. Then he wondered if that was even where it belonged anymore. For the previous week, Sara might as well have been on holiday, but now another of those realizations rolled over him: nothing was going to be the same.

He put the bag just outside the door. Let Sara decide where she wanted it.

Later, she found him in the kitchen scrounging for a snack, and when he offered her some of what he was having, she accepted. They ate on opposite ends of the sofa in silence while a news program ran. Noel didn’t pay much attention to it; everything was terrible, as usual. They shouldn’t even call it news anymore, when nothing they reported was really new.

“Your parents well?” Noel said at last.

“Mm.”

Noel might miss them a little. Not much, because they were educated people, not wealthy but with enough money to send their daughter to good schools, and they’d never quite decided if he was good enough for Sara. He’d miss having in-laws, maybe. Imagine if he could marry Liam, god forbid. He wouldn’t even get any extra family members out of the deal.

The thought gave him that same old scandalous thrill. Surely that should have worn off sometime in the past fifteen-odd years of fucking his brother, and yet.

“You’re feeling all right, then?” Sara asked.

He found Sara’s gaze on him and flushed. Normally he was better at keeping thoughts about Liam in a box, to be brought out only when alone—or alone with Liam, however rare that’d become in the past couple of years. All of Noel’s careful partitions seemed to be breaking down these days, though, their contents leaking out onto everything.

If Sara suspected what was going through his head, she kept it to herself. Noel dragged his thoughts together and said, “Well enough. All normal symptoms, I’m told. Nothing you didn’t have, so I should have guessed, I suppose.”

She nodded. “I still can’t believe it. Any of it.” When she met his gaze, her eyes were wet. A tear rolled loose, and Sara wiped at it roughly. “Fuck, I thought I’d gotten all this out already.”

“Sara,” Noel said helplessly, the beginning of—what, an apology?

“Shut up,” Sara said. She set her plate clattering on the end table, stood up, and straddled Noel’s lap. “Just shut the fuck up, Noel Gallagher.” Then she kissed him, a heated, demanding kiss, with a hint of teeth. “Fuck you,” she said against his mouth. “I’m so—I’m so fucking angry with you.”

“I know,” he said. He’d miss this, too, he realized with a pang: her slim, warm body under his hands, the scent of her hairspray. The way she knew exactly what she wanted from him, and took it. He tried to put that into the kiss: I love you. I’ll miss you. I’m sorry.

Eventually she pulled him down onto her on the sofa. It’d been ages since they’d fucked downstairs, on the furniture. They’d gotten old, Noel supposed. Together they got her trousers down and Noel’s cock out. They were both breathing heavily, both going in for bruising kisses when they could. Somehow Noel was desperately hard, and what the fuck did that say for him?

Noel hesitated when he saw Sara was crying again. “Don’t you fucking stop now,” she said, gripping his arse in her hands.

The scent of her arousal wafted up to him, salty and familiar. Fuck, he would miss this: sinking down into the wet, glorious heat of her cunt. She gasped as he bottomed out, and then she rolled her hips, urging him on.

He held out long enough to bring her off first. She’d always liked that, him stroking her clit until she came around his hard prick. He finished soon after. Breath heaving, he settled carefully onto her. Her top had been pushed askew, and he dropped a kiss on the skin exposed between her breasts.

“Fuck,” Sara said hoarsely.

Noel thumbed across the soft hairs of her arm. “Sara, I—”

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” she said. “Because you aren’t.”

Noel kissed her skin again and said nothing.

That night, Sara moved into one of the guest rooms, the one with the bathroom en suite.

They still saw each other in the kitchen and passing in the hall, those next few days. Sometimes they ate in front of the TV at the same time. They switched off seeing to Donovan when he cried; Noel took the baby monitor one night, Sara the next. Noel made a point of changing more dirty nappies, for practice if nothing else. He thought Sara probably guessed, but she was apparently not bitter enough to deny him his share of literal shit.

They didn’t shag again. Noel thought maybe it would’ve been easier if they did, if they let the tension and fury and sorrow come out in bruises and rough, vicious orgasms. Then he felt like shit for thinking it; that was how he and Liam worked things out.

By the fourth day, Noel felt he was coming nearly out of his skin. He wasn’t made for guilt. The peace between him and Sara was fragile, spun from the most delicate of glass, and Noel was going to hurl it against a wall and smash it to pieces if he stayed in the house one moment longer. He threw on his coat and called, “I’m going out.”

Sara didn’t answer. He supposed she could guess where he was going.

When he got out of the house, he stood there on his front walk and called Liam. “Yeah,” Liam said, after a few rings. Then, in a different tone, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Noel said, although he felt like he was hooked up to an electrical current, like he might split open at any moment. “Are you at home?”

Liam swore. There was a sound of shuffling, then a door closing. “Yeah, and so’s my missus.”

“Meet me,” Noel said. He gave Liam the name of the hotel they’d used to go to years ago, back when the time between tours had seemed an eternity. Going without Liam had felt like going without oxygen, like Noel was a fish sucking in useless gasps of air. He’d thought he might die of the lack if he went too long. He could just barely remember now what that had been like. Those had been the needs of a younger, stupider man, one with less to lose.

Hadn’t they been? But here he was with the phone clutched to his ear, waiting on Liam’s answer.

Liam heaved a sigh. “Fuck it,” he said, which meant yes.

Noel took a cab to the hotel. Even arriving separately, there was always a risk of some bored pap spotting them each in turn or, these days, of some fucking geezer catching them on his cell phone. That’d been why Noel’d stopped them doing this. On tour or at home when the women were gone, he’d told Liam: those were their options.

But Sara was moving out soon enough, Noel was very fucking well never touring with Liam again, and most importantly, Noel was growing Liam’s in his belly. Next to those intractable facts, dodging a few paparazzi hardly factored in. It gave the enterprise a bit of extra zing, that was all.

He got the room and went up to it. The walls were a cool mint green, and somehow that got him thinking about those after-dinner mints with the chocolate. Suddenly they sounded like the best thing in the world—or second best, maybe, behind some kind of alcoholic beverage with the same flavor profile, but he obviously wasn’t having that, was he?

He texted Liam the room number, and then he called down to the desk. The girl on the other end of the phone didn’t so much as pause when he made his request. Afterwards, he thought to worry about Liam and the room service fellow showing up at the door at the same time, but in fact his delivery arrived first. He tipped the guy and retreated with a couple dozen of those chocolate mints piled neatly on a plate.

Another knock came a little while later, and Noel’s phone buzzed. Like old times—or at least recent old times, once they’d both gotten a mobile phone.

Noel went and let him in. It struck him that they were always letting each other into places these days. They lived with doors between them now. Before, all their realest moments had been on a stage, bright and transcendent—and all the most infuriating ones, when Liam flubbed the lyrics by accident or twisted them on purpose or just rambled drunkenly on in the middle of a gig.

Maybe Liam was feeling some of that strangeness; he ducked his head as he walked in, looking uncertain—out of place, wrong. Noel couldn’t have that. He pulled Liam in and kissed him, and something bloomed in him, a kind of relief. Yes, this: he’d needed this even more than the mints. He slipped his hands under Liam’s coat, under the hem of his shirt, and pressed his palms to the wonderful warmth of Liam’s skin. Liam tried to dance away, muttering about the cold, but Noel held him in place and slipped his tongue between Liam’s lips.

After a beat, Liam pulled back long enough to look at Noel. “What’re you eating, mate?”

Noel pointed his chin towards the table where the room service tray lay. It was littered with empty paper candy wrappers.

Liam looked the tray and then back at Noel. “What?” Noel said, feeling self-conscious. That was pretty weird, wasn’t it? A craving, he supposed: Liam’s kid fucking with Noel when Liam wasn’t there to do it himself. “Fuck off.”

Liam, apparently deciding there was nothing strange about this behavior, said, “I like a bit of chocolate. Then kissing’s like dessert.”

He closed the gap again. Now Noel could taste the minty sweetness in Liam’s mouth, and it was better than eating them himself, maybe better even than that dreamed-of alcoholic beverage. Maybe he’d make Liam eat a chocolate mint every time. And then he gave up thinking about that and just focused on pressing himself up against Liam until there were no gaps between them and taking every last trace of it from Liam’s mouth.

They wouldn’t always be able to kiss just like this, Noel thought. He’d not be able to get this close to Liam once he got bigger. The thought was a hot one, searing a line to his cock. Noel groaned and pressed even nearer.

Liam sighed against Noel’s mouth. After a moment, he leaned back and looked at Noel with a critical eye. “You’re better,” he said.

“What?”

“Last time at my place, you were well out of it, mate. Sort of freaked me out a bit.”

Already Noel had trouble remembering exactly what had gone on that day. It’d been a dream, one of those uncomfortable ones that you couldn’t be sure afterwards were nightmares or not. All things considered, Noel still wasn’t sure which it had been.

He’d remember today, though. He’d remember this: Liam biting his lip with old worry, his wool coat solid and real under Noel’s hands. For better or worse, Noel had woken up.

He’d figure out some other time what he’d woken up to. For now, he kissed Liam again. He kissed him as he hadn’t in a long time—years, maybe. Those rare hookups on the last tour had been miserable affairs, both of them always pissed or pissed off or both, always coming away with teeth marks and bruises shaped like fingers, feeling raw in places not mentionable in polite company. How was it Liam wanted to keep on doing that?

Noe’s kisses grew urgent. The same wild, ill-considered need that’d brought him there in the first place seemed to buzz over his skin and along his lips. He needed to feel Liam, flesh to flesh, and meanwhile Liam was still stood there in his heavy winter coat, untouchable. “Come on, fuck, get out of this,” Noel said.

They detached just long enough to start tugging their clothes off. Liam’s coat was folded carefully over the chair, the layers underneath tossed aside with increasing abandon. Noel peeled it all away, piece by piece, until finally he could skim his hands up Liam’s sides and close them around his bare hips. Liam’s cock stood at half-mast. Noel teased his fingers along it just to feel it twitch against his palm, to hear the hitch in Liam’s breath.

Noel’d had a vague idea of getting properly fucked for the first time since Liam had slipped a baby into him, but abruptly he found he didn’t have the patience for it. “Come on,” he said. He took Liam’s hand and tugged him backwards, toward the bed.

Once they were under the covers, it didn’t take much to get Liam grinding his cock against Noel’s hip. They rutted against each other as graceless as teenagers, all body heat and harsh breathing. It wasn’t a drawn-out fuck nor a complicated one. It was exactly what Noel had wanted: something to still that frantic energy under his skin and give him all Liam’s beautiful skin to touch. (Liam would say his skin was like that because he moisturized, the vain cunt. Noel wouldn’t in a million years admit he was glad of it.)

Noel dozed a while afterwards. Eventually he resurfaced to find Liam propped up on one elbow, looking at him. It came to Noel that it’d been a long time since he’d woken up to find Liam still in the bed with him, well before the last tour. “Fuck off,” Noel said. “What do you want now?”

Liam brushed his palm over Noel’s thigh and then up, coming to rest on his stomach. Noel suddenly found it a little difficult to breath, though Liam’s touch wasn’t heavy. “Thought we weren’t going to meet like this anymore,” Liam said.

Noel didn’t know what to say to that. “You should have said no if you didn’t want to come.”

Liam huffed softly. “I wanted to come. But, Noel—I don’t know how we are now.”

“What d’ya mean?” Noel asked, though he had some idea.

“Used to be we had the band, you know. Backstage, and hotels on the road, and—and on the stage, like.”

“We weren’t fucking on the stage, Liam,” Noel said, never mind all the times Liam had casually given him a squeeze, right there where thousands of people could see. Never mind how Noel himself had thought the same thing an hour before. It was like Liam had read his mind. How was it his brother seemed to live on another planet, letting pertinent information pass through him like water through a sieve, yet he could pluck thoughts right out of Noel’s head?

“It was like fucking, though, wasn’t it?” Liam said, his voice pitched a little higher like it got when he’d already given up on Noel understanding him but was going to press on anyway out of sheer bloody-mindedness. “Me singing and you there with the guitar, giving me the notes to sing to. Doing it together, with the music stirring in our blood.”

“Sure, and if you include Gem and Andy and fucking Chris Sharrock, we’d be having ourselves an orgy.”

“Fuck off,” Liam said, scowling through his hurt. Absurdly tender feelings Noel’s brother had, for all his famous front. Liam shifted on the bed, pulling his hand away.

Noel caught Liam around the wrist and held him there, his palm resting over the angle of Noel’s hip. Noel still didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re doing now.”

“You gonna go back to your big house with Sara and have my kid, and maybe I get to see it now and again when you’re feeling generous? I’ll be fucking Uncle Liam, right, because we ain’t—we ain’t telling anyone. And we fuck in posh hotels to get away from the women. Is that right?”

He looked to Noel with a plea his eyes. He wanted Noel to explain the world to him, to set him straight, as Noel had through every crisis in their lives that Liam hadn’t caused himself, and a few of the ones he had, too. When Bonehead and Guigs had left and Liam had panicked, Noel’d promised he knew what to do. When Whitey had left a few years later, it was the same thing again: Noel would handle it, and he had. When Liam was eight and had broken their mam’s favorite vase, the one with the little blue roses painted on, it’d been Noel in all the wisdom of his thirteen years who’d lifted some of the special extra-strong glue from Tesco and then shown Liam how to put the ceramic pieces together again, gluing his own thumb and forefinger together in the process.

Noel sighed, long and slow. He let Liam go and threw his arm over his eyes, so he didn’t have to see Liam’s bright, searching gaze any longer. “I don’t fucking know, all right? I don’t know.”

“But you always know.”

“Well, I don’t this time. Is that fucking all right with you? I’m not God, Liam, I can’t just rearrange the entire fucking world the way I want it.”

Liam didn’t reply. After a bit, the quiet got to be unnerving. Noel took his arm away from his face and found Liam watching him still. His gaze felt like a weight. Noel said, “We won’t have to fuck in hotels much longer, anyway. Sara’ll be gone soon.”

“Gone where?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, she hasn’t seen fit to tell me yet.” Probably she didn’t know herself. He’d overheard her on the phone with an agent the other day, talking about seeing places to let.

“But what d’ya mean she’ll be gone?”

Noel heaved a sigh. “How well did it work for you, being with one person and having a child with another? She’s leaving me, Liam. I suppose you’re happy about it.” He knew well enough that Liam and Sara had never got on, if only because Sara didn’t suffer fools and Liam spent his days actively trying to be one.

Liam had the grace to look a bit guilty. “I didn’t know. Sorry, mate.”

“Don’t hurt yourself. I know how you fucking felt about her. It’ll make it easier for you and me to see each other, at least.” That sounded like a kind of commitment, now that Noel had said it out loud. A plan. Well, having a baby was also a kind of plan, wasn’t it?

“Right,” he said, sitting up. That was quite enough mucking about in his feelings for one day.

“You’re going?”

Obviously, Noel almost said, but something stopped him. “I want to see Donovan to bed, don’t I?”

Liam had no answer for that. He sat up in bed and watched silently as Noel rubbed at himself with a tissue. Some come had stuck to him, but he wasn’t willing to stay long enough for a shower. He pulled on his clothes. He eyed the few remaining mints and decided he didn’t want them. Whatever irrational need had driven him earlier was gone now; they didn’t look the least bit appealing.

He turned to Liam, who was still watching him with eerie, needy focus. Usually Noel could pull himself out of that gaze without too much trouble: say something to fluster Liam or piss him off, or just look away again, so the spell broke on its own. Today he felt caught in it, pinned. He couldn’t move.

Liam got up from the bed with that weird, otherworldly grace he sometimes had. He was still bare, all his bits swinging in the breeze. He stalked up to Noel, caught Noel’s face in his hands, and kissed him. It wasn’t one of Liam’s urgent kisses. He didn’t even open his mouth, so Noel couldn’t find out if he still tasted ever so faintly of chocolate. He cradled Noel’s face gently and kissed him with intent, like he was trying to tell Noel something, though Noel hadn’t a clue what it was.

Liam let go and stepped back. “All right.” He said it with finality, the end of a conversation Noel wasn’t sure he’d had any part in. “Tell Donovan hello, right? Hello from his Uncle Liam.”

“Yeah,” Noel said.

Liam nodded, satisfied. Noel’d been dismissed; now he had only to leave.

So he did.

Sooner than Noel wanted, the day came for his appointment with the paternal obstetrics specialist he’d been referred to. He didn’t like doctors. He didn’t like them examining him. He didn’t like how much they knew nor how certain they were that they knew more about him than he did. He particularly didn’t like coming to them with any symptom that might conceivably be related to past drug use, which was very nearly all of them.

The visit went well enough, for all that. The doctor explained the mechanics of what was happening to Noel, a talk he supposed she gave often if she got a lot of men surprised they were pregnant at all. Not much of what she said should have been new to him after being there through all of it with Meg and then with Sara, but still the details hit differently when he had to apply them to himself. It was his body flooding with all manner of hormones, his feet that might swell.

“I want to have it. The kid. If I can, if it’s possible—I want it.” Noel felt naked just saying the words; he felt like a right idiot. It was easily the stupidest decision of his life, which was saying something, but even sat there on an examining table, self-conscious and a little cold and staring down several more months of increasing physical misery—even then, he still wanted the kid so fucking badly.

The doctor offered him a smile. “Then we’ll do our very best to make that happen.”

“Right,” Noel said. “Right.”

She asked him questions and prodded around his stomach, which felt fucking weird. She kept up a steady stream of commentary—how his uterus would come pushing up out his pelvic cavity in a few weeks, how he’d be able to feel it with his hand even before he started showing. His uterus, Jesus fucking Christ.

At the end of it, she told him that everything looked as it should. “That’s not a guarantee of anything, but it’s good news. At this time, all signs point to you delivering a healthy child about twenty-three weeks from now.”

Noel didn’t know whether he was more relieved by the news or terrified by the timeline. Twenty-three weeks? That was hardly any time at all.

Before he left, the woman in the front of the office scheduled him for another appointment, this time to take another ultrasound and try to determine the child’s sex—although, the doctor had confirmed, most likely it would be a boy.

All told, it could have been worse. Noel still walked out of the office wishing he could have a drink. He was also hungry, though, and that was a problem he could fix. Apparently it was normal for his appetite to pick up now that the nausea had started easing off. He had weight to put on—not too much, the doctor had cautioned. She’d given him a whole dietary pamphlet before he could get too excited.

He went by tube to a cafe where people didn’t tend to bother him. He took a table in a corner, near the window. While he waited for his sandwich, he got out his phone and texted Liam. Not about the doctor’s visit; it’d be too fucking weird to sit there in public, texting about it. He didn’t particularly care to tell Liam any of it, anyway.

Obsolete have a new record out, Noel said instead.

The reply came quickly: ain’t heard them sounds shite.

Noel sighed, more irritated with himself than Liam. They weren't the Beatles; of course Liam didn’t give a shit. Why did Noel even bother?

His phone chirped again. Surprising him, it said, is it good.

Noel looked at those words awhile. He imagined Liam somewhere in London, squinting at his screen. At home, maybe, sat at that cozy kitchen table set against clean, white walls. Noel pulled the phone towards himself and typed, It’s all right. Drummer’s rubbish.

His sandwich arrived, and he texted while he ate. Unprompted, Liam launched into an incomprehensible story about a pigeon harassing him in his garden. Somehow in the punctuation-free texts Noel could hear every inflection of Liam’s voice as he described the bird flapping like a mad thing around his head. Noel found himself chuckling, all alone at his tiny cafe table.

The story wasn’t special; it didn’t make any more sense than Liam’s stories ever did. It was just that Noel couldn’t remember the last time one of Liam’s had made him laugh.

That first meeting with the specialist had eased tension in Noel that he hadn’t even noticed until it was gone. He woke up the next morning feeling brighter, more alive than he had in months. Over breakfast, he texted Kat the PA and tasked her with finding male pregnancy wear in his size that he didn’t loathe.

She texted a confirmation, followed by, Congratulations!

He hid his phone away in his pocket, stricken with some feeling he didn’t try to identify.

Noel’s jeans grew tighter at the waist. One morning they wouldn’t button no matter how he tried to suck his gut in. He stood barefoot on the bathroom tile and stared down at himself. Surely he wasn’t that far yet—hadn’t he only found out last week? The week before at the earliest—but when he turned to the mirror, the proof was there in his profile, the beginning of a swell pushing out from between his hip bones.

He slid his hand inside his open jeans and cupped his belly. There was no kicking; supposedly there wouldn’t be for a week or so yet. It felt normal, like just another part of himself. Nothing untoward happening at all.

“Oh,” Sara said.

Noel hastily pulled his hand free and turned. Sara stood in the doorway, her gaze fixed on his stomach. His jeans were still unfastened, and there was no helping them. Noel crossed his arms. “What is it?”

Sara shook her head and met his eyes. “I’ve got a place. I move in next week.”

“Well. Good.”

“We’ll need to work things out about Donovan.”

“And the child maintenance.”

Sara pressed her lips thin, but she didn’t disagree. “And there’s Anais, unless you want her to just walk into the house one day and find me gone.”

“Fuck,” Noel said. He scrubbed his face with his hand.

“I can tell her if you want, but when she asks me questions, I can’t promise you’ll like my answers.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll do it.” What he’d really have preferred is the two of them telling Anais together, a united front—Sara’d always been a good sport about parenting Anais—but that clearly wasn’t on the table. They wouldn’t ever be a united front again.

Anais took things poorly.

“But why?” she asked, tears in her eyes, face fully screwed into a patented Gallagher scowl. “Does she—does she hate us?”

Noel’d thought he was prepared for this, but now that he’d come to it, he found his preparations were all shit. “Sara doesn’t hate you, I promise. No, look, I promise. You can call her in a bit and ask her, all right? It’s me she’s angry with, not you.”

“What did you do?” Anais asked: not an accusation, but a plea. She wanted Noel to make it all make sense, and of course he couldn’t. At the bottom of it, nothing about it made any fucking sense at all.

He said, “You know, sometimes people sleep with people that aren’t their wife or their girlfriend, and that can fuck things right up.”

“You did that?” There was the disappointment.

“I’m afraid so.”

“But you could say you’re sorry. Sara wouldn’t leave if you said sorry, would she?”

Noel’d tried to see a way around this, but Anais was bright; if he didn’t tell her then, she’d make the connection later, on her own, and he thought that’d be worse. Probably. He took a breath and said, “I’m pregnant, Anais. I’m having a baby—a little brother or sister for you and Donovan.”

Anais looked at him with huge, round eyes. A tear rolled down one cheek, unnoticed. “You are?”

“So they tell me.”

She considered that revelation for a bit in quiet, tearful contemplation. At last, she said, “My friend Ollie says only gay men have babies.”

Christ. “Well, friend Ollie’s not in full possession of the facts, thank you very much.” But he sighed after he’d said it. Anais would hear that from everyone; he might as well explain the full situation. “A person doesn’t have to like only men or only women, you know. Maybe they mostly like one, but then sometimes they like the other. Like me.” There he was, telling his ten-year-old something he’d never gotten around to outright saying to a single other person on Earth, and it wasn’t even the worst part of the conversation.

“Does Sara hate the baby? Is that—is that why she’s leaving?”

“She doesn’t hate it,” Noel said. What it symbolized, what it meant: yeah, she probably hated that. But he’d spare Anais those nuances. “It’s just I’ve made my decision, and she’s made hers, and here we are.”

It went on like that for a while longer. Anais’s questions turned harsher, angrier, as he’d known they would. She never got quite around to declaring she hated him or the baby or Sara, and that was a far better result than he’d had any right to hope for.

At the end of it he said, “Now, this is just between us for a bit. No telling your mam, you understand?”

Anais considered this, scowling and tearful. “Because she’ll tell everybody.”

“Yeah.” As soon as Meg knew, all the rest of London would, too. “You can tell her about Sara, but keep it quiet about the baby, yeah? Just for a month or two, and then—then everyone will know, anyway.”

He saw her teetering between wanting to tell Meg out of spite—Noel honestly wasn’t sure which of her parents she got that impulse from—or keeping quiet because she’d lived with Meg for ten years, after all, and knew quite well what she was like. Eventually, reluctantly, she agreed to keep the news to herself. She let him draw her into a hug, and that was its own victory. Not that it felt like much of one when she started crying again in his arms.

Questions kept coming from Anais all that weekend. Who was the man Noel had slept with? Was Noel going to marry him?

“God, no,” Noel said.

Who would take care of the baby? What about Donovan? What about when Noel was away on tour? Would the baby live with a nanny?

They were questions Noel had avoided facing square on, and he had no good answers for her. He felt he’d aged five years by the end of the weekend when he sent Anais back to her mam. Anais looked older, too, and sadder. Noel told himself that’d been the worst of it, the massive earthquake; after that it would all be just aftershocks.

Cardboard boxes began to spring up around Noel’s house like mushrooms, and then, like elves, strangers appeared to pack things into them. Noel divided his time between hiding in his study with his guitar, in his gym working through his modified, doctor-approved exercises, and browsing in shops. He’d have all that empty space to put more trainers in, wouldn’t he? Besides, he hadn’t so very much time left before he became obvious and going out in public became a brand new kind of ordeal. Better to make the most of it.

He found trainers with Adidas trefoils stuck up from the backs like demented ganja leaves, and he thought of the photo Liam had sent from Milan. Carefully, without putting too much thought into it, he texted Liam a photo. The reply came back almost immediately: mad shit man.

He sent another photo, of purple ones this time with the sides and tongue padded with stuffing. Tag says they’re aubergine.

fuck off they look like shoes to me.

That night, in the dark, early hours, Noel woke up to piss—an occurrence he was promised would become increasingly common, oh joy—and found a load more messages from Liam. After finishing his business Noel looked at the phone again and, instead of doing the wise thing, he scrolled idly through them. Drunken gibberish even the spellchecker couldn’t save, impossible to make sense of, and then—

noel I don’t know how if were not in a band, read the text, clear as day.

Noel stared at it. The timestamp was three minutes prior; the text had come while he’d been at the toilet. As if some ghostly hand were guiding him—possessing him, rather—he typed, How what?

The reply was slower this time than the one earlier that day. Maybe Liam had fallen asleep. It’d be better if he had. It’d be better if Noel hadn’t replied in the first place. Fuck. Noel closed his texts, and then the notification flashed.

be brothers

Noel felt a nascent, warning queasiness. It was how he responded to most stress anymore (and seafood, and hunger, and—). He took a slow, careful breath, closing his eyes, and when he’d let the breath out again, the words were still there—not seeming quite so nauseously bright anymore, not quite as insistent.

He still didn’t know what to say to them. If Liam were in the room Noel would stick his hand down Liam’s jeans, say something cutting, both. Maybe kiss him, an impulse Noel thought had bled out of him years ago and yet seemed to have returned in the past month, a fucking renewable resource.

Go to sleep, he said, and put the phone aside.

The boxes began to disappear again, migrating to the new place, let courtesy of Noel. It was quite a nice one, judging by the photos. The house emptied out. Sara and Donovan had taken up far more of it than Noel had guessed, and now shelves, closets, whole rooms stood desolate.

At last Sara stood at the front door with Donovan in her arms. A cab waited by the curb with Donovan’s baby things already loaded in it—the most important ones, at least, that she couldn’t go a night without. The others had already gone. Her eyes were dry, her gaze cool. An observer might think her completely unmoved.

Noel knew better, and a fat lot of good it did him. Words didn’t exist in the English language that could make any of it better, make any of it up to her. No point in embarrassing them both by trying.

“I’ll be by to see about the rest of the things in a couple of days,” Sara said.

“Right,” he said.

There was no point in watching the car drive away, either, so he didn’t.

The very next fucking day after Sara left was another doctor’s appointment. The doctor’s office had a chill, especially when Noel pulled up his shirt to let her inspect him and then let the technician smear cold jelly on him. Goosebumps rose on his arms. He couldn’t quite stand to look at himself, so he looked at them and then at the ghostly, distorted figure on the screen. It shifted as he looked, moving its little ghostly arm. For a moment Noel felt some seismic, altogether unidentifiable shift in feeling. The next moment the feeling was gone. That was a baby on the screen, for some reason it was his, and he felt nothing about it at all.

Afterwards, he found himself at that same café overlooking the square. It’d drizzled earlier; now the clouds had thinned enough to let a little more light through, though not enough to be called proper sunshine. Noel sat at the same table and watched the people pass below, some of them throwing back their hoods and lifting their faces to the sky.

One of them was Liam.

Noel blinked; looked again. It was him. There was no mistaking that arm-swinging saunter. Noel thought he recognized the coat—one of the prototypes from his clothing label Liam had shown off to the band a few months prior. As Noel watched, someone approached Liam, phone in hand. Of course Liam obligingly huddled in for a selfie; he yearned for that attention like a flower yearning for the absent sun.

Noel pulled out his own phone. Before he could think better of it, he texted the name of the café and the street it was on. Then his sandwich arrived, and he immediately got lost in it. Food seemed to taste better these days than he remembered. He didn’t know whether that was hormones or just the relief of no longer being constantly nauseated.

A few minutes later, in the corner of his eye, a figure approached. It was Liam. He slid into the chair opposite Noel at the tiny table, nearly close enough to brush their knees together. He pushed his dark shades up his forehead and gave Noel a long, level look. “I thought for sure you were having me on,” he said at last.

“About what?”

Liam’s eyebrows rose. He swung his gaze around the place and back to Noel.

“I saw you down there,” Noel said, nodding towards the square. Now, with Liam looking at him, it seemed an inadequate explanation. Since when was he willing to be seen in public with Liam? Since when did he want to see Liam anywhere other than in bed or on the stage? What had he been thinking?

Well, he hadn’t been, that was all, and now here they were. “Chip?”

Liam gave him another hard look, still waiting for the prank to reveal itself, but eventually he reached the short distance across the table, took a chip, and dipped it in sauce. “Where you been, then?” he asked.

“At the shops,” Noel said. The lie came easily. He’d meant to go after this. Or he’d thought about it, anyway. Surely money, correctly applied, could fill in a few of the holes Sara’d left about the house.

“For what?” Liam asked, looking a little more interested. For a man who declared he didn’t care about money, he quite enjoyed spending it.

“Guitar pedals,” Noel said.

As Noel had intended, Liam grunted acknowledgement and asked no more questions. He reached for another chip.

They weren’t friends, the two of them. They were a lot of things to one another, more than any two brothers ought to have been, but they had remarkably little in common—other than their mam, their childhood, their football team, the band they’d shared for almost half their lives, and the child Noel was currently gestating. Christ.

They didn’t talk, was the point. They didn’t meet for lunch, and not just because of the paps. They had absolutely fuck-all to say to each other.

Noel wrapped the remains of his sandwich in the paper it’d come in. Liam watched, not saying a word. “I’m going home,” Noel said. He pushed to his feet. Still Liam sat there, chewing on a chip, watching Noel with wary focus. “Are you coming?” Noel asked.

They took a cab. The driver grinned hugely at them and said in accented English, “Ah, Liam Gallagher!” He and Liam chatted all the way, eventually settling with mutual enthusiasm on the topic of crisps, of all things. If the driver recognized Noel, he made no sign of it.

“Crisps,” Noel said, when they’d escaped from the cab and were standing outside his front door.

“Nothing like a good crisp,” Liam said.

This font of inarguable wisdom was Noel’s brother. Half of Noel’s child’s genes had come from this man, God help it. Noel turned the key with perhaps a bit more force than necessary. He closed the door behind them, turned, and found Liam staring at him again. “Fucking what?” Noel demanded. “What are you gaping at me for?”

“What are we doing here, Noel?”

Noel blinked at him. He appeared to be serious. “What do you think we’re doing here?”

“Dunno.” Liam’s hands were in the pockets of his coat. He waggled his elbows in a kind of mutated shrug. “Your missus about?”

“No,” Noel said, with quite a lot of confidence given he hadn’t even thought of her until that moment. But as he listened to stillness of the house, he remembered she’d texted him that morning, saying she’d come by tomorrow to deal with the last of her things. She wouldn’t be around to see anything Liam and Noel might get up to. She wouldn’t ever be around again.

“No,” he said again. He stepped in close enough that he had to look up to meet Liam’s eye. He could very nearly feel the expansion of Liam’s chest as he took a breath. “Now, let’s try again. What do you think we’re doing here?”

“You want to—here? In the house?” Liam was hilariously scandalized considering they’d recently shagged in his house twice in one day.

Normally Noel would have found it funny, but he couldn’t just then. The last thread of his patience was near to snapping. “You see all the packing boxes behind you? The empty shelves?”

Liam nodded.

“Yeah, that’s because my missus is leaving me, so are you gonna come upstairs and let me pretend for five fucking minutes I haven’t made the stupidest decision of my entire fucking life? Or you gonna stand here and give me time to reconsider?”

Liam only looked at him, brow knit, as if he meant to do that very thing.

“For fuck’s sake,” Noel said. He slipped his hand inside Liam’s and tugged him towards the stairs. Liam followed along willingly enough, if uncharacteristically quiet. Even his footfalls seemed muffled against the carpet.

Noel led him to the master bedroom with the stark, minimalist light fixtures Sara had been so enamored with and the beautifully soft sheets Noel had insisted upon. Liam pulled up just outside the door, leaving Noel standing inside, all alone.

“Are you gonna just leave me here?” Noel asked. His throat had gone tight; the words hurt a little. He was on the verge of something, and he didn’t want to find out what it was. Fuck, he didn’t have it in him to soothe Liam’s weird new qualms. “You watching from the doorway while I fucking see to myself?”

Liam warily crossed the threshold, looking around like he thought Sara might pop out of a closet at any moment. Again: it ought to have been funny.

When he was within reach, Noel put his hands to Liam’s waist and pulled him closer still until he felt the bulge of Liam’s lax cock against his thigh. Liam’s eyes were wide, but there was finally a spark of interest in them. Christ, imagine if Liam got tired of Noel. He’d never come close in all the years they’d had this thing between them—not even when Noel wished he would—but then Noel’d never given him what he wanted before: not something permanent. Not a baby.

Noel gripped the back of Liam’s neck and brought him down for a sharp, bruising kiss. After a bit, he murmured, “You wanted to have me proper, was that it?” Liam’s shiver and the tightening of his hands on Noel’s hips were all the answer he needed. Against Liam’s mouth, Noel said, “Prove it.”

Liam made a sound in his throat that could have been a snarl. He gave Noel a hungry, lingering kiss, and then he walked him back towards the bed. Noel had stripped half his clothes off when Liam made a different sort of noise. Noel paused, startled. The next moment, Liam slipped his fingers inside the stretchy waistband of Noel’s new jeans. He didn’t say a word, only tugged the jeans slowly past Noel’s hips. His gaze was fixed as if it’d been screwed into place, and he didn’t seem to be breathing.

Noel hadn’t looked at himself much other than that one day in the mirror. Better not to find out how little time he had left before the whole fucking world discovered what he’d been up to. Even at the doctor’s, he’d mostly managed to avoid it. Now, with Liam staring, Noel couldn’t help but look.

Earlier he’d just appeared bloated and a bit softer than he already was, like the beer and takeaway were catching up to him faster than they’d used to. Now he had a clearly defined curve. Not a big one, not obvious when he was in his clothes, but it looked less like a paunch and more like he was pregnant.

Liam took a shocked breath, breaking his frozen stillness. He gripped Noel by the shoulders and sat him gently but firmly on the bed. Then he knelt between Noel’s feet circled his hands around Noel’s waist, or what remained of it. He brushed carefully over Noel’s belly with his thumbs, and his eyes had a sheen to them entirely at odds with the kind of afternoon Noel’d planned for.

“What happened to fucking me proper?” Noel asked.

At last Liam tore his gaze away from that swelling at Noel’s middle. He looked dazed. Noel wasn’t sure he’d even heard him.

“Your cock up my arse, remember?” When even that didn’t seem to move Liam, Noel sighed. “You can sob buckets afterwards, yeah? Be an utter woman about it if you like. After the shag.”

“Piss off,” Liam said, as he always did when Noel called him a woman—never mind which of them more nearly resembled one at the moment—but at least some of that heat had finally come back into his eyes.

Noel reached for the lube in the bedside table and sloppily slicked himself up while Liam watched, palming himself with purpose. Noel got a pillow positioned under his hips, lay back on the bed, and bent his knees. “Well?” he said.

Liam hurriedly moved in to do his part. He rolled on the condom Noel’d given him. Then he braced himself above Noel, took himself in hand, and pushed in.

Noel took some deep, deliberate breaths as Liam breached him. It’d been a while. Contrary to what he told Liam, he did let other men at his arse occasionally, but that last occasion had been ages ago—almost a year, probably. He’d had no one but Liam since then and even him only a couple of times. But despite his hurry earlier, Liam pressed in slowly, careful about fucking as he wasn’t careful about many things. Gradually Noel was able to relax around him.

“Yeah?” Liam asked, when he was fully seated.

Noel nodded. He shifted a little, wrapping his legs around Liam’s waist for support and drawing a strangled grunt out of Liam for good measure. “Go on, then.”

Liam dragged his cock out of Noel, slow and hot and delicious. He shoved it back in a little quicker, and that was just as good. Noel’d missed this: the slick, heavy fullness; the harsh sound of Liam’s breath; even the wet slap of his skin against Noel’s, because of course Liam was already sweating. Noel was remembering now why they so rarely fucked this way: because Liam’s fierce, bright gaze on him so often felt like too much, full of soppy feelings Noel couldn’t stand to look at. Today, on a gray November afternoon, pregnant and quite decisively single, Noel found he didn’t care. Let Liam do his worst.

In a pause, as Liam adjusted his angle, Noel cupped the back of his neck and tugged him down for a kiss. Liam grunted in surprise, but after a beat his mouth softened against Noel’s. He opened to Noel’s tongue, and they kissed like that, hanging together in that stolen moment of time.

“Noel,” Liam breathed at last. The word was warm against Noel’s mouth. For a few beats everything was still, and into the silence Liam whispered, “I thought you’d left me.”

It didn’t matter which time he meant. I thought I had, too.

“Never mind that,” Noel said. He stroked Liam’s neck, slick with sweat.

That was the encouragement Liam needed. He pushed up away from Noel, braced himself, and pressed in again. He wasn’t looking at Noel anymore; he was too focused on what he was doing. Noel hung on through each thrust with his hands on Liam’s arse, urging him on. In that moment he wanted Liam to run him straight through, to draw blood. He wanted bruises shaped like fingers and teeth. He wanted to feel the fucking afterward with every step he took.

Liam came with another grunt and a bitten off curse. Slowly he sank down onto Noel, gasping for air and still twitching with aftershocks. Noel rolled his hips, rubbing up against Liam’s belly. It was not, it had to be said, a particularly firm surface for rutting against, but Noel’s wasn’t going to wait.

Still lying on top of him, Liam worked his hand between them and squeezed at Noel. Somehow that was enough to finish him.

Liam was sprawled over him, hardly even pulled out, and Noel’s come was currently drying between them like glue. Yet Noel didn’t want to move. As long as Liam stayed where he was, weighing Noel down and pressing him into the mattress, the sex wasn’t over, and there wasn’t anything else he had to think about.

“Your turn next time,” he said, like he had every so often over the years.

“Mm?”

“It was your cock that got us into this. High time you returned the favor.”

“Not fucking likely,” Liam mumbled.

Noel hadn’t had much hope. It was gay to take a cock up your arse, but not to suck off that same cock: the Liam Gallagher guide to male sexuality. Noel still tried, every so often.

He succumbed to the inevitable. “Liam, get off, we’ve got to clean up.”

Liam grumbled, half-asleep. He rolled off Noel, tied off the condom, and wiped at them both with tissues from the bedside table. He got the worst of it off, probably. Then he stretched out next to Noel—on his side like he’d always done, so he could keep on looking at Noel, even though his eyelids looked about as heavy as Noel’s just now.

Noel let his fall shut.

Noel woke all at once. He half-expected to find himself alone as he had in Liam’s bed that day, either just yesterday or an eternity ago, but no, there Liam was, watching him still. When he saw that Noel was awake, Liam reached across the scant distance between them and carefully palmed Noel’s belly.

Noel shivered. Liam touching him there made things feel real all over again.

“You should get a doctor,” Liam said.

“What?” Of all the things Noel’d expected to come out of Liam’s mouth, that wasn’t one of them.

“You’ve got to make sure it’s healthy and that. They’ve got vitamins and things for when you’re pregnant, too. There’s probably a special one for if you’re a man.”

“I have a doctor,” Noel said. “I’ve just been to see her today.”

This was an unpleasant surprise, judging by Liam’s frown. “You never said.”

“Well, it don’t fucking concern you, does it?” Noel said, nettled.

“What do you mean, it don’t? It’s my kid!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Noel rolled over onto his back, so he could look at the ceiling instead of Liam.

“Is it all right?” Liam asked. “It’s—it’s got all its fingers and things?” There was worry in his voice, the same Noel’d felt while the technician had wanded over his belly with the ultrasound. This was the kind of thing Liam should have fucking considered before he talked Noel into keeping the thing.

Noel scrubbed his hand over his face. “Well, they can’t see there’s any missing, anyway. Those pictures they get are shit. There’s only so much you can tell from one of them.”

“You’ve got more pictures?” Liam asked.

“In that folder I had when we came in,” Noel said. “I put ‘em on that table inside the front door.”

Liam shoved off the bed and disappeared downstairs, still quite naked. When he returned, he sat on the bed and handed Noel the closed folder.

“I thought you wanted to see,” Noel said, perplexed.

“Yeah,” Liam said, looking like he only half meant it. The worry was still evident in his face. He dipped his chin towards the folder. “Go on, then.”

Never-ending font of drama, Noel’s brother. Noel sighed and slipped the images out. “See, there’s the fingers,” he said, pointing them out. “That’s the foot.”

Liam accepted the pictures cautiously, as though he still didn’t entirely trust them not to hurt him. Noel reckoned he couldn’t have dragged Liam’s gaze away for anything, though. With a finger Liam traced around the bulbous head—not an attractive child they were having, at least not yet—and the curve of its tiny arse. Eventually his other hand stole over to Noel again and came to rest against his belly, casual, as though it had every right to be there.

“Couldn’t make sure of the sex, though,” he said. “The little shithead wouldn’t fucking turn around and let them have a look.”

“It’s a girl,” Liam said absently, gaze still fixed on the pictures.

Noel scoffed. “Oh, is it? Thought you told me that never happens with two fellas.”

At last Liam met his eye again. “Yeah, but there ain’t fucking anyone like us, is there? I worked it out. We make things happen that never happen. Like this,” he said, thumbing across Noel’s belly.

Drily, Noel said, “I think you’ll find many, many people have made poor decisions that resulted in children.”

“No, man, you’re not listening.” Liam’s eyes blazed, his gaze so intense it was like he meant to press the words into Noel’s skin, into his mind. “She’s special, she is. She’s gonna be a mega songwriter, and beautiful, and we’re gonna love her so fucking much.”

Noel looked away. His throat had gone tight.

“Maybe she can write for Oasis, even.”

The words brought a chill down the back of Noel’s neck. “Your Oasis, you mean,” he said, even as he was sure Liam meant nothing of the sort. “You and Gem and Andy. What’d you say you’re calling it, Oasis 2.0?”

“What shite are you talking? I mean the real Oasis, our Oasis.”

For a moment there, Noel had felt something different. Something lighter, brighter that he couldn’t quite identify. Leave it to Liam to smash that to pieces like he did everything else. “Get out,” Noel said. He didn’t have a row in him; he already felt wrung out. He lay back on the bed and threw his arm over his eyes. “Get the fuck out of my fucking house.”

“What are you—”

“Leave.”

There was a pause. “Fucking emo little gobshite,” Liam muttered. The bed shifted. Clothes rustled. After about sixty excruciating seconds, Liam left. Noel heard him hit that creaky board at the top of the landing that Sara’d always complained about but never got around to fixing and now never would. Then Noel was alone. Really, truly fucking alone except of course for the parasite he couldn’t seem to rid himself of, which was a fucking apt metaphor now that he thought of it.

He held onto that thought like a buoy keeping him afloat, but after a few moments he lost his grip. The hot feeling in his eyes spilled over. His arm got wet, and he couldn’t seem to take a steady breath. Then he couldn’t breathe at all because his nose had filled up with mucus. He admitted what was happening to him, sat up, and began to cry into his hands.

The tears dried up eventually. Noel was left feeling congested, dried out, and with a headache. He was still naked, his arse a little sore, his hips aching with what must have been sheer old age. Salt in the wound, that was.

He threw on trackie bottoms and a big loose t-shirt, clothes that he’d never have set foot out of the house in. That was all right, because he wasn’t going anywhere. He was in his big empty house all by himself without a soul to see him, and he meant to stay there. Until the birth, possibly. Christ.

He was hungry again. Hadn’t he just eaten? But he supposed this was how it would be now. Hungry constantly, living on brand new instincts he didn’t understand and couldn’t predict. He headed down the stairs dreaming of beans on toast.

“There you are,” said a voice from the living room.

Oh for fuck’s sake. “I told you to leave,” Noel said. He’d cried all his fury out; all he had left was exhaustion and something worse he dared not put a name to yet: a black, bottomless morass. “Fucking get out.” He passed the living room and went on to the kitchen. He didn’t fucking care if Liam left, so long as Noel didn’t have to look at him or talk to him or think of him anymore.

Naturally, Liam followed him to the kitchen.

“For God’s sake, Liam,” Noel said.

Liam’s eyes narrowed. “You been crying?”

“No.” Noel turned his back on Liam and put a slice of bread in the toaster. He was still too congested to breathe properly; he sniffed despite his best efforts.

Suddenly Liam was directly at Noel’s elbow. He did that sometimes: lulled you into thinking he was always a noisy fuck, and then snuck up on you. His face was furrowed in worry—now, of course, after the damage was already done. “What’s wrong?”

“Well, I don’t know, Liam. Why don’t you hazard a guess.” Noel looked at the toaster and tried not to see Liam looking at him. He wanted to eat something and go back to bed. He wanted to sleep for ages. The prospect of simply never leaving the house again grew more and more appealing—at least, it would be once he managed to throw Liam out of it. He wasn’t sure he was capable of that kind of effort, though. Perhaps Liam would submit to living in the kitchen and leaving Noel alone upstairs.

Fat chance.

“I’m sorry,” Liam said, shaking Noel from his thoughts.

Noel scoffed. “For what?”

Liam sort of shrugged, mouth gapped open, his expression one of mildly concerned bafflement, or was that just plain stupidity? Noel would’ve hated him in that moment if only he had the energy.

“Right,” Noel said. There was an ache threatening in his throat, but he’d humiliated himself more than enough for one day, and he absolutely wasn’t going to tear up in front of his brother. He cracked open a can of beans to spread on his toast. When it was ready, he ate the whole thing in about four bites with Liam still staring at him all the while. Noel sort of wanted another one, but not as much as he wanted to escape the kitchen.

He was halfway to the door when Liam caught his arm. All Noel’s miserable frustration boiled up at once, and he shoved Liam’s hand away. Liam caught sight of his glare and took a startled step back, and yet still he wouldn’t leave it alone. “Noel?”

Quietly, Noel said, “My girlfriend left me. She took the last of her stuff and left me here with a fucking massive, empty house. I’m having a baby for you like an absolute fucking idiot. Stupidest decision of my fucking life. It was you or her, and I picked you, Liam, and—” Noel took a shuddering breath. “—and all you care about is fucking Oasis.”

He took another step for the door. Liam grabbed hold of him again. Before Noel could shake him off—and then maybe throw a punch, maybe claw Liam’s fucking eyes out—Liam pulled Noel in and wrapped his long octopus arms around him. He didn’t let go when Noel tried to push free, only held him tighter. Noel gave up and let him. He gripped the fabric of Liam’s shirt. His eyes grew wet again, entirely without his permission.

“I’m sorry about Sara,” Liam said.

Noel snorted. “No, you fucking ain’t. We both know you hated her.”

Liam took a deep breath that pressed against Noel’s chest. “I’m still sorry.”

Noel didn’t dare laugh for fear it’d come out more of a sob. He said nothing, just stood there and let himself be held. Liam stroked across his shoulder blades, back and forth. Noel wanted to protest—he hadn’t become a child himself just because he was pregnant with one—but he couldn’t quite muster up the energy.

After a while he pushed away again, and this time Liam opened up his arms and let him go. “I’m going back to bed,” Noel said. It was still early even on his current old-man schedule, but bed sounded far better than any other place he could go or be.

“All right,” Liam said.

Noel was halfway up the stairs when he realized Liam was following him. “That wasn’t an invitation,” Noel said. Liam blinked up at him and made no move to turn around.

Fine. Whatever.

Once in the bedroom, Noel pulled off his clothes again, climbed under the covers, and ignored Liam following suit. After a moment the bedside light turned off, and Liam spooned up behind him, grumbling quietly. Noel rarely put up with that, but again it was too much effort to complain. He let Liam drape his arm over Noel’s waist and breathe gently into his hair.

“Look, Noel—”

“Stop,” Noel said. “Whatever the fuck you want to say, I can’t listen to it right now, all right? I fucking—I fucking can’t.” A dangerous play. There was a fifty-fifty chance that admitting weakness would only make Liam push harder, but Noel was so tired.

Liam shifted minutely behind him but didn’t say anything else. After a bit, Noel felt himself drift away.